Various animals, particularly larger animals such as horses, are fed and watered from buckets that are supported on vertical support surfaces such as walls. Such buckets are quite heavy when fully loaded with feed or water. Various brackets are known for supporting such buckets on a wall. Preferably, it should be relatively easy to lift and remove the buckets from such brackets. In addition, the brackets must be strong enough to support the fully loaded weight of the buckets.
Certain support brackets are known which comprise an elongated bracket body that is bolted or screwed to a wall or post. A lip on the bottom of the bracket body is hooked into a channel on the rim of the bucket. The bail on the bucket is swung back into a seat formed on the bracket body above the lip. A pin can be dropped down in front of the bail to retain the bail in the seat. The bucket is supported on the support bracket by the bail retained in the bail receiving seat along with the support provided by the lip hooked into the rim channel of the bucket.
While such a support bracket is effective, it typically can hold only a single size of bucket or buckets that are close in size to one another. The reason for this is the bail receiving seat is placed to receive bails for certain sized buckets, but not bails for substantially larger or smaller buckets. If a substantially larger bucket is hung on the lip, the bail of such a larger bucket would not fit within the seat that would hold the bail of a smaller bucket. Thus, known brackets are not as adaptable for holding buckets of widely different sizes as would be desirable.
One known prior art bucket attempted to solve this problem by making the bail receiving seat vertically adjustable relative to the lip on the support bracket. Thus, the bail receiving seat could be slid up and down to receive the bail regardless of the size of the bucket hung from the lip. However, it is inconvenient and time consuming to have to make such an adjustment simply to adapt the bracket from one sized bucket to another sized bucket. As a practical matter, the bail receiving seat would often be left in a single position and the support bracket would be used for hanging buckets of a single size. Thus, this type of adjustable bracket was not as user friendly as would be desired when trying to support or hang different sized buckets from the support bracket.